These plays explore complex family and social dynamics: - August: Osage County examines a dysfunctional family gathering after their father disappears. - Clybourne Park looks at the same house over 50 years, addressing racism and gentrification. - Proof questions whether a daughter can prove authorship of a revolutionary math proof like her late father. - Doubt raises questions about guilt and innocence when a nun suspects a priest of abuse. - Ruined, set in war-torn Congo, follows a brothel owner navigating clients from both sides of the conflict.

1. DRAMA GIANTS
OF THE 21ST
CENTURY

2. August Osage County
August: Osage County is
set on the plains of modern day,
middle-class Oklahoma. The
Weston family members are all
intelligent, sensitive creatures who
have the uncanny ability of
making each other absolutely
miserable. When the patriarch of
the household mysteriously
vanishes, the Weston clan gathers
together to simultaneously support
and attack one another.

3. Clybourne Park
Clybourne Park is a play written by Bruce
Norris. The first act takes place in 1959. He questions
Russ's health and new office. Russ feels uncomfortable
when Jim asks how he is doing personally and tries to
engage him about his son. Russ uses foul language,
which makes the situation tense.
The second act takes place fifty years later in
2009, in the same house. Lindsey and Steve bought it
and want to tear it down, which has created problems.
Kathy, their lawyer, helps to define vocabulary. Tom
leads the group in their discussions. Kevin and Lena are
neighbors representing the Home Owner's Association.
Her great aunt lived in the Clybourne Street house after
the Stollers, from Act 1.
Kathy is trying to help her Caucasian friends
who bought the house. Her parents are Betsy and Karl,
who tried to dissuade the Stollers from letting African
Americans move into it.

4. Proof
Proof. It is a 2000 play by the
American playwright David Auburn. The
play concerns Catherine, the daughter of
Robert, a recently deceased mathematical
genius in his fifties and professor at the
University of Chicago, and her struggle with
mathematical genius and mental illness.
Upon Robert's death, his ex-
graduate student Hal discovers a paradigm-
shifting proof about prime numbers in
Robert's office. The title refers both to that
proof and to the play's central question: Can
Catherine prove the proof's authorship?

5. Doubt, A Parable
Based upon a few circumstantial
details and a lot of intuition, the ultra-stern
nun, Sister Aloysius Beauvier believes that
one of the priests at the St. Nicholas
Catholic Church and School has been
molesting a 12-year-old boy named Donald
Muller, the school's only African American
student.
The point of John Patrick
Shanley's Doubt is, the realization that all
of our beliefs and convictions are part of a
facade we build to protect ourselves. We
often choose to believe in things: a person's
innocence, a person's guilt, the sanctity of
the church, the collective morality of
society.

6. Ruined
On one of her usually busy days
running her bar / brothel, Mama Nadi is visited
by Christian, a regular customer who also
serves as a go-between for Mama and
merchants who supply her with cigarettes, rare
luxuries like lipstick and chocolate, and one of
the tools of Mama’s trade – girls who, for
various reasons, are forced to enter a life of
prostitution.
As time passes, Mama’s bar is visited
by leaders of both the government army and the
rebels. She makes sure to keep them both happy
so that she can retain their business and also
prevent them from attacking her.